KS – My mother collected seeds, so that there would be something to plant in the spring. [My sisters] were in school. I and my [younger sister] were at home, and I found those seeds and ate them. When mother wanted to plant, there were no seeds left, and she asked where they were, if someone had eaten them. I said it wasn’t me, but who else could it have been? My younger sister was still very little and my [older sisters] were in school, so it had to be me. So [my parents] beat me, and then they cried and hugged me and asked me to forgive them. When the famine ended, and I would bring this up, they said, "Oh child, don’t talk about that painful time. I’ll never forget this. But we survived because my father listened to his cousins and joined the collective farm. And also, my mother’s sister’s husband worked at the mill, where they milled grain with wind power, and sometimes, when they were milling grain for the collective farm and some grain fell between the stones, he collected it, and fed his family and gave some to us too. My mother would mix [this flour] with cobs, grass or whatever, and that’s how we survived. In the spring, very many people were dying, because when the little apples and acacia ripened and bloomed, people would gorge themselves because they were starving, and then they died, because their stomachs [couldn’t digest the food]. Many people were lying dead in the streets, and a wagon would pick them up. I ’ll never forget my friend, who was from a poor family that had already died. She was left alone in their zemlyanka (earthen dugout). She was climbing up [from the zemlyanka] and died on the stairs. She may have still been alive, and I saw how they came and dumped her on the wagon like a dog. What else do I remember? After the Famine, a woman from the neighboring village came and asked if she could stay with us for a few days, because she was looking for her children. During the Famine she had left her children at a bus station so that someone would take them to an orphanage, because they could at least get fed there. She said, “If they stay with me, they’ll starve to death. I have nothing to feed them. They threw me out of my house and sent my husband to Siberia.” This woman traveled around Ukraine looking for her children. In the neighboring village, Sofino, there was an orphanage. She found her son, but I don’t know if she found her daughter. Her son didn’t want to go with her. They had taught him Stalinism, he became a member of the Komsomol, and refused to believe what his mother told him [about the Famine].